Legislation Competition

About the Competition

After several years’ hiatus, Legis is proud to announce that it is reviving the annual N.Y.U. Legislation Competition. First held in 2014, the Competition seeks to engage the creativity and intelligence of N.Y.U. graduate student body & alumni in solving pressing policy and regulatory problems. The competition is open to all students at N.Y.U. School of Law (including first-year students) as well as students at other N.Y.U. graduate schools (e.g. Wagner, Silver, etc.) and alumni of the same. The competition is particularly focused on the art of policy advocacy through academic research and legislative drafting.

All participants in the Competition will receive a written prompt and will have approximately one month to produce (1) a piece of model state or federal legislation that addresses the problem identified in the prompt and (2) a 5-10 page academic white paper in support of the model legislation. These submissions will be graded by a Competition Committee for content, creativity, feasibility, form, and persuasiveness. The winning student entry and winning alumni entry will be given the chance to work with Legislation‘s editors for publication through our online companion, Quorum, and invited to participate in our spring panel discussion on March 12th. The winning student entry will be given a cash prize in an amount to be determined.

The inaugural policy problem challenged students to tackle the issue of access to legal representation and produced a number of interesting proposals. The winning proposal, published in the 2014 volume of our online companion Quorum, sought to address this concern by “authoriz[ing] state agencies that administer Social Security Act programs to open negotiations with the appropriate federal agencies to create demonstration projects that provide people with legal counsel.”

In Spring 2019, students will address the challenge of regulatory responses to sex- and gender-based violence and harassment on college campuses.